


Dog and Hare

by Trojie



Category: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: First Kiss, Gen, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-25
Updated: 2012-04-25
Packaged: 2017-11-04 07:18:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/391219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes observes almost everything, and understands very nearly nothing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dog and Hare

**Author's Note:**

> You know sometimes you come home from a movie and you write something and then you lose it because Googledocs is a bottomless pit where fanfiction goes to die? And then you find it again actual years later? Yeah, that's what this is.

You share rooms on Baker Street, and he opens the curtains one morning after you have spent so long at work that you cannot recall the month, and even you can tell you frustrate his military sensibilities. 

You are very poor at divining motive for all your genius at method, but he is a very particular specimen, is Watson. He accompanies you on a case and he jumps every fence with you, physical and metaphysical, even if (when) he knows not what lies beyond. That is the start of your intellectual association as opposed to your mere cohabitation.

Watson is both military and medical, a singular combination, for it means he is a man of observation and reaction, whereas no matter how much you rely on the former you consider the latter simply too slow. He will diagnose where you will deduce. You are used to disguise to gather data, you are used to following with interest the routines of others. You wear his clothes, you make his customary bets for him when he is detained. As he learns from you, you learn from him - there are things he saw on campaigns that no medical textbook nor pamphlet of the Queensberry rules would dream of. You never had the problem of fighting with excess emotion, but his very presence means you must learn to fight as if undistracted. You have to learn that he can be trusted to take care of himself.

You do not understand his preoccupation with ladies. The chase, perhaps, you can understand, but not the precise lure of the apparent reward. Dinner with Mary Morston bites deep in an unexpected place - you have fought it fiercely because you do not want to think it is worth your time, you do not want to acknowledge her as a threat to your settled existence of bachelordom and experimentation, blood and acetone, pipe smoke, dog hair on shared waistcoats ...

She asks, and you tell her about herself - deducing things but failing to diagnose as ever; though you read her skin tone and her jewellery you clearly fail to read her posture (and before Watson, a man who has seventeen different ways of standing bolt-upright, would you have ever thought to do such a thing?), and she bathes you in a fine claret. The incident causes Watson pain, although you cannot divine why. You cannot even divine your own motives in the situation.

Mary doesn’t last long, in any case. There are other women afterwards, as well, and slowly you begin to realise that however much Watson diagnoses his own condition as love, serial passions, there is another explanation; one far more logical. Watson, like you, only seeks to chase, and eventually the greyhound sights on another rabbit streaking past him - you. 

You have no idea how to behave, what to do, although there have been hours you spent in dens of sin and vice and there are pictures running through your head, vast reams of carefully catalogued information and you have no idea at this moment of how it is at all applicable to this situation. You have no time for research. For once in your life you want something that you know nothing about. 

He breathes harshly through his nose and reaches for you.

This mustn’t register on an emotional level.


End file.
